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Interesting Times

Paul C. Brown

Sometimes, I admit, I struggle to find topics for this editorial piece. There is only so much you can say about Ubuntu, Free Software, and Linux before you start repeating yourself. But there is no danger of that this month, oh no! There is enough in the news on Ubuntu to fill a book, let alone, one side of an A4 page.

Dear Ubuntu User Reader,

Sometimes, I admit, I struggle to find topics for this editorial piece. There is only so much you can say about Ubuntu, Free Software, and Linux before you start repeating yourself. But there is no danger of that this month, oh no! There is enough in the news on Ubuntu to fill a book, let alone, one side of an A4 page.

In quick succession, Mark Shuttleworth announced there would be no stable version of Unity 8 after all (and 17.10 Ubuntu would be returning to Gnome), Canonical was ending its "convergence" adventure (which means no more Canonical-backed Ubuntu Phones), the Mir project was getting cancelled, Jane Silber resigned, and Shuttleworth himself took over as CEO like back in the old days.

Shuttleworth later revealed that all of the above was part of the preparations for taking Canonical public. It makes sense from a business point of view: Canonical's end-user projects, its desktop, Ubuntu Touch, and so forth, have not become profitable, no matter how many resources and how much money was thrown at them. The server, virtualization, and cloud business units have been making money since 2015, however.

When launching an IPO, one wants to present a lean and profitable company to prospective investors. They are, after all, in it exclusively for the money.

Should we, the end users, be worried? Will we be left out in the cold, with a platform that will slowly languish away due to a lack of updates, until it becomes unusable?

Unlikely. Firstly, Mark Shuttleworth gets a lot of hate from several sectors, but, despite often making decisions that ruffle some feathers, he is definitely not a heartless villain. Quite the contrary, I have personally met him several times. He is a nice guy, and he is quite selfless in wanting to improve Linux users' lot. Ubuntu for end users may not be part of Canonical's business plan, but it still is part of Shuttleworth's vision. Having a person with Shuttleworth's sway, resources, and charisma behind a project goes a long way.

And this sort of thing has happened before: When Red Hat closed their free (as in beer) project, users were up in arms. But supporting Fedora has turned out fine for the community. It is easy to imagine that Shuttleworth would have Canonical sponsoring community-driven projects that use Ubuntu-based technologies, even those that cater to end users.

Secondly, even in the really, really unlikely case that Shuttleworth/Canonical were to cut off the end-user limb completely, an open source project doesn't die unless the community wants it to. Say what you want about Canonical, but all of their tech is available openly to the community, and there is already at least one fork of Unity 8 (check out Yunit [1]) that will be ported to Wayland, and a Dutch group of hackers has started a business [2] and a community-backed project [3] that are working on further developing and porting Ubuntu Touch/Phone to as many terminals as they can lay their hands on (check out our article on Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 2 in this very issue).

Finally, there is too much riding on Ubuntu for end-user oriented projects to just give up on it. Linux Mint, all the traditional derivative flavors of *buntu (Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.), new arrivals like neon, and so on and so forth will keep the repos stocked and the PPAs on Launchpad updated.

A final thought: GNU/Linux was born with a community and is one of the most successfully crowdsourced projects ever. There is no way that this is going to have a major impact on the bigger picture. Even if the worse happens and things like Unity, Ubuntu Phone, and so on languish (allow me to reiterate, this is so improbable it is hardly worth considering), there are plenty of other user-oriented projects that will gladly give Ubuntu users the haven they need.

There is an ironic Chinese saying that goes: "May you live interesting times." This may be apocryphal, but apparently you say this to enemies, and it is more a curse than well-wishing. The irony comes from the fact that "interesting times" are usually convulsive and often catastrophic for those who have to endure them.

But Ubuntu users are living some interesting times, and it doesn't have to be bad at all.

The Budapest Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-O) kicked off on Monday, May 9, at the Corinthia Hotel. "Accessibility is one of our core values as a project," Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said in his keynote address, as he acknowledged the Unity documentation team contributions to the 11.04 release. After briefly looking back at the "Natty Narwhal" Ubuntu release, Shuttleworth set his sights on the upcoming release, saying, "Our goal, our mission is 200-million Ubuntu users in four years."